Puking seemed like a very good idea. It might get in the way of the crying. Because now she really wanted to cry. But she wouldn’t let that happen. She didn’t deserve to cry after what she had done.

“I’m not even sure I know what was happening because at some point, I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.” Don’t say anything about the people you killed, she thought, even as the desire to confess was rising up inside her. Never tell what you did. They don’t need to know. No one needs to know.

“People ate each other. They committed suicide. They murdered each other. It was carnage. Blood ran in the streets like water.” She was panting now. There was nothing she could do to stop her memories. Talking about it made it real. She would get the story out, then never talk about what had happened in Talas again.

“It’s okay, Michelle,” Billy Ray said. “We’ve been tranquilizing Mollie just to get her stable enough to use her portals without killing herself or anyone else. Anytime she opens one close to Talas, well, it goes badly.”

Joey started giggling. “Oh, fuck me,” she chortled. It was bordering on hysterical. “I’m giving you the award for Most Understated Assessment of a Fucking Insane Person, Billy Ray.”

Billy Ray’s eyebrows drew into a line and for a moment, Michelle thought there might actually be a fight.

“Can we please table the whole beat-the-crap-out-of-each-other thing right now?” Barbara asked. “Let’s get Mollie in here and figure out what our next move is.”

“I’m done,” said Mollie.

But Babel wasn’t paying attention to anything Mollie said. She just used Mollie to get what she wanted, to send her people around the world, like Mollie was some kind of charity taxi service, and then she couldn’t even have the courtesy to listen. What a fucking ungrateful bitch. She’d be a lot more respectful after Mollie opened her—

Oh, God.

She was doing it again. Giving over to rage. Mollie looked around to convince herself that Horrorshow’s malign influence hadn’t seeped through the portals. But the portals were closed and folks weren’t trying to nibble on each other’s eyeballs. No, it wasn’t so simple.

She was tainted. Repeated exposure to the madness had changed her. It was as though her brain had been rewired, lowering her threshold for anger—no, not just anger, but incandescent rage—until anything could set her off. It no longer took a nudge from supernatural evil to push her thoughts in wickedly violent directions. Her emotional barometer had been destroyed. Her emotional state had only two readings: teetering on the verge of becoming a useless blubbering heap, or fantasizing about tearing people apart in retaliation for the most minuscule of imagined slights.